Builders also showed signs they are planning to ramp up construction later this year. The number of permits they lined up to build units rose 7.4% last month to an annual pace of 1.396 million. (…)

Apartment starts surged 24% in January, while construction of single-family homes rose just 3.7%. Permits for buildings with five units or more likewise were up more than 25%, while permits for single-family homes fell 1.7%.

Over the longer-term, new-home construction is picking up. Total starts rose 7.3% in the 12 months through January, while single-family starts rose 7.6% during that period. (…)

U.S. Import Prices Rise in January Prices for foreign-made goods imported to the U.S. rose in January, driven by a broad range of product price increases and capping a week of solid inflation readings.

Import prices increased 1% in January from a month earlier, the Labor Department said Friday, beating expectations of economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal. The January rise matched November’s increase and hasn’t been exceeded since May 2016, when the index grew 1.2%. (…)

Nonpetroleum import prices rose 0.5% in January and 2.8% annualized in the last 3 months. (Chart from Haver Analytics)

Cass Truckload Linehaul Index

January’s Cass Truckload Linehaul Index (measuring changes in linehaul rates) continued the acceleration established in November and December (up 6.3% and 6.2% respectively) by posting a 6.5% YoY increase, to 133.5 (just shy of December’s 134.5 all-time high).(…) “In just the last seven months, our pricing forecast has increased from -1% to 2%, to 6% to 8%, and now giving us reason to believe the risk to our estimate continues to be to the upside,” stated Donald Broughton, analyst and commentator for the Cass Indexes. “The current strength being reported in spot rates tells us contract pricing rates should keep rates in positive territory well into 2018.”

Cass Intermodal Price Index

The latest data point shows total intermodal pricing rose 5.0% YoY to 141.4 in January (an all-time high) with a YoY three-month moving average increase of 4.3%. (…)

(…) The release of the recommendations had a swift market impact Friday. Stocks of steel and aluminum makers, including Nucor Corp. , US Steel Corp. and AK Steel Holding Corp. , soared. Aluminum prices rose 2% in London trading. Stocks of manufacturers that use the metals, such as Caterpillar Inc. and Harley-Davidson Inc., fell. (…)

It is one of the many ways that Mr. Trump, in pursuit of more aggressive trade enforcement, is turning to long-dormant powers that his recent predecessors have been hesitant to use, especially since the 1995 founding of the World Trade Organization discouraged such broad, unilateral trade actions. (…)

Section 232 “is a little like old-fashioned chemotherapy,” Texas GOP Rep. Kevin Brady told Mr. Trump. “It isn’t used as much because it can often do as much damage as good,” added Mr. Brady, who chairs the Ways and Means Committee, which oversees trade policy.

Defense companies have also raised worries. “We are concerned that tariffs may have an unintended impact on the global supply chains that our industry depends on,” said a spokesman Friday for the Aerospace Industries Association. “It’s particularly true of aluminum and steel.” (…)

In the Tuesday White House meeting, Mr. Trump suggested he placed a higher priority on trying to protect workers than consumers, even at a time of a historically low 4.1% jobless rate. “You may have a higher price…but you’re going to have jobs,” he said. “To me, jobs are very important.” (…)

(…) “If the final decision impacts China’s interests, China will certainly take necessary measures to protect its own rights,” Wang said. [Wang Hejun, chief of the trade remedy and investigation bureau at China’s Ministry of Commerce] (…)

(…) Looking more deeply at the January jump in CPI shows definite trends, according to Steven Blitz, chief U.S. economist at TS Lombard. Deflation in the prices of consumer goods we like to buy is ending; the rate of increase in the cost of things we have to buy either is rising, as for food and energy, or remains high, as for services or rent.

Goods inflation has been held down since the mid-1990s by increased low-cost imports, technology, or slowing spending by “aging baby boomers” (or should that be “aged”?). The dollar’s weakness is boosting import prices (up 1% in January and 3.6% from its level a year earlier), which should pass through to consumer prices this year and into the next. (…)

Stephanie Pomboy of MacroMavens via the same Barron’s article::

Nondiscretionary outlays—for food, energy, housing, and medical expenses—have accounted for 55% of the increases in household spending over the past two years. During that same period, savings have been “pillaged,” she writes in a recent missive to clients. “The ineluctable conclusion is that the decline in saving is occurring out of necessity, not choice.”

In another note, Pomboy points out that the cost of paying back debt jumped by $62 billion through the third quarter—which predates the most recent rise in interest rates. Given the increase in rates since then and the Fed hikes likely this year, she conservatively estimates an additional $75 billion jump in debt service in 2018. “That alone would wipe out nearly all of the $80-to-$100 billion boost to growth forecast from the tax cuts,” she observes.

As for drag from the fiscal side, President Donald Trump’s suggestion last week of a 25-cent-per-gallon tax would wipe out 60% of the benefit of the tax cuts to individuals, according to Strategas’ Washington team lead by Daniel Clifton. No wonder this trial balloon was made of lead. (…)

(…) Producers should keep cutting for the whole year, even if it causes a small supply shortage, Al-Falih said. “If we have to overbalance the market a little bit, then so be it,” he told reporters in Riyadh last week. (…)

“They are definitely not a price dove anymore,” said Mike Wittner, head of oil market research at Societe Generale SA. “They have to think about their social costs, about Vision 2030, about the Saudi Aramco partial IPO or private placement. Al-Falih’s statement last week could not have been much clearer.” (…)

“If you’re Mohammed Bin Salman, and trying to radically reinvent your country” then “you need a certain price to make it work,” said Helima Croft, head of commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets LLC. (…)

As of 2014 there were about 5 million borrowers with such large loan balances, out of 40 million Americans total with student debt. Large-balance borrowers represented 17% of student borrowers leaving college or grad school in 2014, up from 2% of all borrowers in 1990 after adjusting for inflation. Large-balance borrowers now owe 58% of the nation’s $1.4 trillion in outstanding student debt. (…)

(…) At the top of the heap is Switzerland, where household debt has climbed to 127.5% of gross domestic product, according to data from Oxford Economics and the Bank for International Settlements. The International Monetary Fund has identified a 65% household debt-to-GDP ratio as a warning sign.

In all, 10 economies have debts above that threshold and rising fast, with the others including New Zealand, South Korea, Sweden, Thailand, Hong Kong and Finland.

In Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the household debt-to-GDP ratio has risen between five and ten percentage points over the past three years, paces comparable to the U.S. in the run-up to the housing bubble. In Norway and South Korea they’re rising even faster.

The IMF says a five percentage-point increase in household debt over a three-year period is associated with a hit to GDP growth of 1.25 percentage points three years down the road. (…)

Collectively, those 10 economies have $7.4 trillion in total economic output and a household debt stock about the same size. Taken as a whole, that’s more than the output of Germany or Japan. Moreover, many of them have a large stock of adjustable-rate mortgages that could suddenly become more costly to service should global interest rates rise. (…)

Figure 29 suggests that in comparison to other high-income countries, fast-rising house prices relative to incomes in the countries studied have in large part been caused by both low levels of housing stock and a lack of house building. In 1990, the UK, Australia, and the US all had comparatively low levels of housing stock relative to population size, and while this increased slightly between 1990 and 2000, these levels have since declined.

As a result, the levels of housing stock per 1000 inhabitants aged over 20, in the whole period from 1990 and 2015, increased only marginally in the UK from 555 homes to 560, and decreased in Australia from 544 to 539. In the US, the figure in 1990 was roughly the same as the figure in 2015. Moreover, although starting from a higher level, Sweden has also seen a decline between 1990 and 2015. Comparatively, in Germany and Japan, which have had the largest long term declines in HPIR (as shown in Figure 29), housing stock per 1,000 inhabitants aged over 20 has risen rapidly from 546 to 616 and 459 to 576 respectively.

In an analysis of eight high-income countries, the Resolution Foundation think tank found that millennials in their early 30s have household incomes 4 percent lower on average than members of so-called Generation X at the same age. (…)

The peaks in dependency ratios around the late-1960s and 1970s represents the point at which members of the baby boomer cohort were just reaching working age. Higher dependency ratios in the years prior to this were caused by large numbers of dependent ‘children’ i.e. under 20s. In contrast, the increase in dependency ratios starting around the 2000s is caused by an increase in the proportion of over 65s.

An impressive 84% of investors in a UBS survey say last week’s market dip was “temporary” and “not indicative of recession” and 86% say “economic fundamentals are still strong,” according to a UBS “Investor Watch Pulse” survey released Friday. Still, 80% of those surveyed believe the market will be more volatile going forward. (…)

Big stock market declines typically are triggered by a growth scare or geopolitical event, but this downturn was sparked only by evidence of higher average hourly earnings, a signal of rising inflation, and worries the Fed would accelerate interest rate hikes. (…)

Although 68% of those surveyed in the midst of last week’s volatile global market swings believe now is a good time to buy stocks, only 10% to 15% have put cash to work or boosted their stock investments during the pullback. (…)

The business owners surveyed remain hopeful, but are slightly more cautious than earlier this year. For instance, 51% are optimistic about the stock market outlook over the next six months, down from 81% in January. While 36% planned to boost hiring in January, by February, only 24% are. (…)

EARNINGS WATCH

To date, 80% of the companies in the S&P 500 have reported actual results for Q4 2017. In terms of earnings, more companies are reporting actual EPS above estimates (75%) compared to the 5-year average. In aggregate, companies are reporting earnings that are 5.3% above the estimates, which is also above the 5-year average. In terms of sales, more companies (78%) are reporting actual sales above estimates compared to the 5-year average. If 78% is the final number for the quarter, it will mark the highest percentage of S&P 500 companies reporting positive sales surprises since FactSet began tracking this metric in Q3 2008. In aggregate, companies are reporting sales that are 1.5% above estimates, which is also above the 5-year average.

The blended (combines actual results for companies that have reported and estimated results for companies that have yet to report) earnings growth rate for the fourth quarter is 15.2% today, which is above the earnings growth rate of 14.7% last week.

If the Energy sector were excluded, the blended earnings growth rate for the remaining ten sectors would decrease to 13.2% from 15.2%.

The blended sales growth rate for the fourth quarter is 7.9% today, which is equal to the sales growth rate of 7.9% last week. [Thomson Reuters says that excluding the Energy sector, the revenue growth estimate declines to 7.0%.]

Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S reports that 42 of the 96 (44%) pre-announcements for Q1’18 were positive, up sharply from 29% and 32% at the same time in Q1’17 and Q4’17 respectively and from 26% since 1995.

Q1’18 estimates are +18.0% from +12,2% on Jan.1.

Trailing EPS are now $132.96. Pro forma for the tax reform, assuming a 7.0% average positive impact, trailing EPS rise to $142.27.

Industry analysts have raised their consensus S&P 500 earnings estimate for 2018 by $9.00 per share over the past seven weeks to $155.26 during the week of February 2. That’s mostly on guidance provided by managements during January’s Q4-2017 earnings season about the very positive impact of the corporate tax cut enacted late last year. The actual Q1 earnings season is still ahead, starting in April. By then, corporations are likely also to report that the weak dollar (down 7.7% y/y) has boosted their earnings.

TECHNICALS WATCH

Lowry’s Research reminds us that the “market plunge from late Jan. was accompanied by two 90% Down Days (Feb. 2nd, Feb. 5th) and one near-90% Down Day on Feb. 8th – compelling signs of the intense selling needed to exhaust Supply. These 90% Down Days were followed by two 80% Up Days (Feb. 12th, Feb 14th) and the registration of a conventional short-term buy signal by our Short Term Index, also on Feb. 14th. While less-than-ideal, this combination of 80% Up Days and a short-term buy signal has, in the past, provided sufficient evidence that a sustainable market bottom is in place.”

Industrial production—a measure of everything made by factories, mines and utilities—fell 0.1% from a month earlier, the Federal Reserve said Thursday. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expected a 0.3% rise. An initially reported 0.9% gain in December was revised down to 0.4%.

Utility production picked up last month, largely reflecting cold weather that caused homes and business to turn up the heat. But that gain was offset by flat manufacturing output and a drop in mining production. (…)

Capacity use, a measure of slack, dropped two-tenths of a percentage point from a month earlier to 77.5% in January. That’s 2.3% below the economy’s average since the early 1970s. (…)

Economists said the decline in output is almost surely temporary. Other reports, include surveys of manufacturers, suggest factories are seeing higher demand boosting production. (…)

True. Markit’s January Manufacturing PMI survey revealed that

The latest index reading indicated a strong improvement in business conditions across the manufacturing sector. Moreover, the index signalled the strongest upturn in the health of the sector for over two-and-a-half years. Extending the trend seen since June 2016, manufacturers indicated a further rise in production in January. The rate of growth accelerated to the sharpest in twelve months.

Then, how come manufacturing output has been essentially flat since October?

And real retail sales declined 0.2% in December and 0.8% in January.

And vehicle sales have declined 7.6% from their September 2017 peak to stand below their 2016 and 2017 average.

Rates on the spot market, where companies book last-minute transportation, have come down from record highs hit last month amid a nationwide shortage of available trucks. Shippers have postponed deliveries that aren’t urgent or are moving more cargo by rail, reducing pressure on trucking fleets struggling to hire drivers.

But many shippers and trucking companies warn that the lull may not last, for a number of reasons. The strong economy is boosting freight demand. Produce distributors typically hire more trucks starting this month to move crops from Mexico and Southern states to grocery stores around the country. Full enforcement begins in April for a new federal safety rule that requires truckers to electronically log hours behind the wheel, potentially removing some big rigs from the road.

Last week, the average spot rate for the most common type of big rig was $2.17 per mile, down from $2.26 in January, though still up a third from a year ago, according to online freight marketplace DAT Solutions LLC. Capacity remains tight, with demand measuring at about seven loads per available truck for the week ending Feb. 10, compared with 2.4 loads per truck during the same period in 2017, according to DAT. (…)

Higher freight costs are weighing on corporate profits and raising prices for consumers. On Thursday, wholesaler US Foods Holding Corp. USFD 9.60% said the shortage of available trucks hurt its fourth-quarter profits, and it will attempt to pass along those costs to its restaurant and food-service customers in the coming months. Last week, Tyson Foods Inc.TSN 0.05% said rising freight costs will help push meat prices higher at the supermarket.

Cereal-maker Kellogg K 3.07% Co.’s logistics costs rose at a double-digit rate in the fourth quarter, with percentage increases in the high single digits expected in 2018.

Tight capacity is giving trucking companies the upper hand in negotiations over long-term freight contracts. Contract rates are expected to rise as much as 10% in 2018. This week,Werner Enterprises Inc., WERN -0.39% a large Omaha-based trucking company, reset its guidance on rate increases at between 6% and 10%, up from 4% to 8%. (…)

(…) Mr. Cohn downplayed any concerns reflected by markets on Thursday. “We know how to deal with inflation. We don’t know how to deal with deflation in this country,” he said. (…)

The budget deficit fell to 2.4% of gross domestic product in 2015 before rising to 3.4% last year. Economists at J.P. Morgan expect the tax cuts and spending deal will boost the deficit to 5.4% of GDP next year, or $1.2 trillion.

Mr. Cohn said the White House pays close attention to deficits but said higher spending was necessary to secure new defense investments. The administration had to agree to non-defense spending increases to secure votes for the extra Pentagon funding, he said.

“Ultimately deficits do matter,” he said. “We don’t really have a choice here. We need to make a large investment in modernizing our military.”

He’s right. There are not so many ways to deal with inflation: lift interest rates enough to stop demand.

One sure way to raise inflation, however, is to boost demand when it is already strong, stretch resources when they are already stretched and borrow tons of money to do so.

Then you raise interest rates…

THE BIG DIPPER (2)

Since the correction low last Friday, the S&P 500 jumped 200 points (7.9%).

If that was it, we once again re-wrote history with a historically short 13-day correction.

The rising 200-day m.a. once again proved a good stopper, as was the Rule of 20 P/E at “20” (THE BIG DIPPER?).

I suggested to watch coming inflation data as well as the fixed income market, particularly the High Yield market.

Investors pulled $14.1 billion from debt funds, the fifth-largest stretch of redemptions in the week through Feb. 14, according to a Bank of America Merrill Lynch report, citing EPFR data. High-yield bonds lost $10.9 billion alone, the second highest outflow on record. (…)

And beneath the surface, pain metrics have been building up of late.

Derivatives tied to corporate bonds moved more than the underlying cash debt last week — another sign that investors sold more liquid holdings during the equity turmoil rather than offload harder-to-sell debt, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. (…)

We are now back to a level which is 7% above the 200-d. m.a. and a Rule of 20 P/E of 21.1 (if we pro forma trailing EPS for a 7% average tax effect), a quick return to overvalued territory.

Many are concluding that the correction was just a technical “thing” and that we are back on the jolly ride.

And yet, meanwhile, in just a few days, inflation data got much worse, retail sales data were very bad, manufacturing data has flattened, interest rates rose further, the high yield market is shaking, the USD is weak and gold is rising. Something not quite right.

This via John Mauldin:

The index was developed by New York Federal Reserve President William Dudley in the 1990s. It measures financial conditions in money markets, debt and equity markets, and the traditional and shadow banking systems. While the inverse of the index does not perfectly track the S&P 500, it has historically acted as a coincident indicator with peaks in the US equity markets.

The Goldman Sachs FCI is a weighted sum of a short-term bond yield, a long-term corporate yield, the exchange rate, and a stock market variable.

(…) A monthly measure of what households pay for everything except gasoline and food rose a seasonally adjusted 0.349% in January—the strongest one-month increase since March 2005—driven by broad-based increases in costs like rent, clothing and medical services. (…)

While the consumer-price data suggested that inflation is growing, some analysts said it is doing so at a manageable pace. That is unlikely to cause the Fed to alter radically the pace of interest-rate increases it has signaled, analysts said. (…)

In the 12 months to January, overall prices rose 2.1%, beating economists’ expectations of a 1.9% rise. A jump in gasoline prices in January helped drive the increase. When stripped of volatile energy and food prices, the index was up 1.8% from a year earlier. (…)

Analysts cautioned that a few components of the consumer-price report could prove to be aberrations. Apparel prices reversed three months of declines in January, rising 1.7%, the largest monthly boost since February 1990. That category has experienced deflation for large parts of the last two decades because of a flood of cheap imports, and few analysts see it becoming a new source of inflation now.

More increases in the consumer-price index could be in store. Price drops last spring for a handful of items, such as wireless-phone plans, led to a string of soft inflation readings. Fed officials said they expected this would prove transitory. With last year’s price cuts fading into the past, annual measures of inflation are on track to pick up in the months ahead. (…)

NO DENYING

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, the median Consumer Price Index rose 0.3% (4.2% annualized rate) in January. The 16% trimmed-mean Consumer Price Index also rose 0.3% (3.5% annualized rate) during the month. The median CPI and 16% trimmed-mean CPI are measures of core inflation calculated by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland based on data released in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) monthly CPI report.

Over the last 12 months, the median CPI rose 2.4%, the trimmed-mean CPI rose 1.9%, the CPI rose 2.1%, and the CPI less food and energy rose 1.8%.

Note that the above numbers are rounded to one decimal. January CPI was actually +0.5385% while core CPI was +0.34945%, its highest reading since March 2005. The annualized rates below use the 5 decimal readings on total CPI and core CPI. The Cleveland Fed’s rates use one decimal numbers.

The Cleveland Fed’s inflation nowcasts are produced with a model that uses a small number of available data series at different frequencies, including daily oil prices, weekly gasoline prices, and monthly CPI and PCE inflation readings. The model generates nowcasts of monthly inflation, and these are combined for nowcasting current-quarter inflation. As with any forecast, there is no guarantee that these inflation nowcasts will be accurate all of the time. But historically, the Cleveland Fed’s model nowcasts have done quite well—in many cases, they have been more accurate than common benchmarks from alternative statistical models and even consensus inflation nowcasts from surveys of professional forecasters.

The NY Fed’s UIG derived from the “full data set” increased slightly from a currently estimated 2.94% in December to 3.00% in January. The “prices-only” measure decreased slightly from 2.18% in December to 2.17% in January.

And, BTW, the January jump in inflation was not caused by accelerating Services prices (core Services: +0.3%, +2.6% YoY) but by core Goods which spiked 0.4% after a 0.2% gain in December. Weak dollar impacting?

PRODUCER PRICE INDEXES – JANUARY 2018

The Producer Price Index for final demand increased 0.4 percent in January, seasonally adjusted, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Final demand prices were unchanged in December and moved up 0.4 percent in November. On an unadjusted basis, the final demand index rose 2.7 percent for the 12 months ended in January.

The index for final demand less foods, energy, and trade services rose 0.4 percent in January, the largest advance since increasing 0.5 percent in April 2017. For the 12 months ended in January, prices for final demand less foods, energy, and trade services moved up 2.5 percent, the largest rise since 12-month percent change data were available in August 2014.

Core PPI is up 3.3% a.r. in the last 3 months, from +2.4% the previous 3 months and +1.6% for the 3 months before. Core goods PPI is up 2.8% a.r. in the last 3 months, the same as in the previous 3 months. Pipeline inflation keeps crawling up: core processed goods prices for intermediate demand are up 4.0% a.r. in the last 3 months after +4.9% in the previous 3 months. They are up 4.6% YoY.

Whichever way I look at the inflation numbers, I get scared:

the Fed could find itself really behind the curve (the yield on 10-year Treasuries climbed to 2.93 percent, the highest in more than four years);

the U.S. consumer could find itself really squeezed (real retail sales declined a huge 0.8% in January after dropping 0.2% in December); another weak month in February and we could get a negative GDP in Q1’18!

The U.S. just cannot afford a recession, however mild it could be, with its current and embedded debt levels.

Jerome Powell on Tuesday:

We are in the process of gradually normalizing both interest rate policy and our balance sheet. (…) The financial system is incomparably stronger and safer, with much higher capital and liquidity, better risk management, and other improvements.

(…) “We believe we have to err on the safe side and make sure that the market has balanced,” Mr. Falih said at a news conference. “And if we have to overbalance the market a little bit, then so be it.” (…)

Mr. Falih said he wasn’t concerned about U.S. production. He pointed instead to oil-storage levels going down in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a sign that the global glut of oil is diminishing.

“You have to look at it from a bigger perspective,” he said, “What matters to me is inventories are going in the right directions and supplies are in the right direction.”

Mr. Falih and his Russian counterpart, Alexander Novak, both dismissed the idea of unveiling a so-called exit strategy from the OPEC production cuts—an idea advocated by some oil analysts as a way to prepare the market for the end of their agreement.

“We have to think about exit only when the market balance is achieved,” Mr. Novak said. (…)

TECHNICALS WATCH

LR says that yesterday’s “rally produced the second 80% Up Day over the past three days, as NY Up Volume was 83% of total Up/Down Volume.” LR’s indicators registered “a conventional short term buy signal” and “a traders’ buy signal”.

(…) In contrast, Mr Trump stands for nothing but red ink. He inherited a US fiscal deficit of $587bn in 2016. By next year it will have doubled to $1.2tn — or more than 5 per cent of gross domestic product. If the tax cuts passed in December are made permanent, which is likely, America’s budget deficit will exceed $2tn in less than a decade. US public debt, meanwhile, will soar to its highest levels since the second world war, at more than 100 per cent of GDP. Normally it would take a deep recession to do this to public finances. But Mr Trump and the ex-Tea Party are pulling it off in the midst of strong growth. (…)

Ray Dalio, billionaire philosopher-king of the world’s biggest hedge fund, has a checklist to identify the best time to sell stocks: a strong economy, close to full employment and rising interest rates.

That may explain why the firm he created, Bridgewater Associates, has caused a to-do the past two weeks by quickly amassing an $18 billion bet against Europe’s biggest companies. The firm’s total asset pool is $150 billion, according to its website.

Economic conditions in Europe appear to fit Dalio’s requirements. Last year, the continent’s economy grew at the fastest pace in a decade, and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has indicated he’s on a slow path toward boosting rates as economic slack narrows. Factories around the world are finding it increasingly hard to keep up with demand, potentially forcing them to raise prices. (…)

But Bridgewater’s trades in the U.S. remain a mystery. The Eurozone requires that investors disclose their short bets once they pass a certain size. The U.S. does not.

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